I am finally caught up to real-time after all my previous posts were about the past (August 1st, 2008 up till now). To update the numbers: 19 months into our debt destroyer plan. $38,500 paid off so far! $61,800 left to go (only the house). Our combined income is under 90k & we will pay off about 20k of debt each year. I guess my debt plan has been more of a combination of John Cummuta
and Dave Ramsey
. I have not been building a fully funded emergency fund (6 months of expenses) because I would rather be paying off debt than pause the payments for about 8 months. I figure if a financial crisis happened where I needed six months of expenses, I would just have to go back to the credit card
but I would have paid off a whole lot of debt in the mean time. If no crisis happens then I am way ahead of the game and building a 6 month ffef after we are totally debt free will only take about 4 months. I am willing to take the risk that no major crisis will take place before 12/01/12 and we will be free. Wish me luck.
to pay off one car payment and half of the other. I then focused on the second car payment by attacking it with the debt snowball. I, unlike 
except for the house. That felt so great to escape from the bondage and know that I would never go there again! The only thing left then was the mortgage. $77,500 (13 more years) remaining on the mortgage (no heloc or 2nd mortgage, yea). My debt snowball had grown to $1100 EXTRA that I was paying on the principle every month. Before that, I was only paying off $300 of principle each month but now it is $1400 & growing! Add in some tax refund money each year and the House WILL be paid off on 12/01/2012. This will be about 2 years sooner than my original calculation (I thought we would be totally debt free in about 6 years). That will be $100,000 paid off in about 4 years! Then what? A cruise to celebrate our freedom sounds good! The funny part of this whole process is that I keep wanting to fast forward the months so I can pay the next payment. Ever watch the movie 
also went bye bye. At least the credit cards were still in exile, safely collecting dust. Honey, I see a McDonald's cup in the garbage but it isn't written on the Tracker, what part of write it down don't you....
, my wife was about to hear the b-word. There are three things in life I KNOW. 1: Life is short. 2: What goes up must come down. 3: My wife was not going to like this. To my wife, debt is normal. She says it is no big deal to owe money, everybody else does. On the other hand, I kind of freak out knowing I owe money because it is just adding years to how long I will need to keep working. I want to retire early. REAL EARLY! The best way to accumulate money is to shut off the outflow pipe. I wanted our money to really be our money, not GMAC's, Kohl's, Target's, Chase's, CitiBank's, etc. Step one was stopping all credit card usage. DW didn't like this one bit. All I could tell her was "trust me". The credit cards were gathered and sent to exile. Now it was time to figure out how, when, and where our money would go to start paying the creditors. $100K owed including the house. Yes, thankfully our 
, time to re-figure it out.
. I googled and googled all day and mainly came across the same sites and blogs. One name kept coming up in all these sites. This guy named 
and he had a real detailed plan on how to become debt free. I had to find out more....I became a Ramsey junkie. All Dave, all the time. I listened to his podcasts, read his books, googled & googled evertyhing I could about him and the people following his plan. I now had a clue! Now the real fun began...time to get a really big fork!
!!!! I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. My wife had been handling all the bill payments and checking/savings accounts so I was kind of just a bystander to the whole situation. I was aware of all the debt but pretty much numb to it all as we had enough money coming in, but just as much (or more) going out.